Dr Susanne Gatz is a clinician scientist who aims to combine her clinical expertise in solid tumours with her laboratory interests and expertise into translational research into DNA repair and sarcoma to ultimately identify better treatments for children with cancer, in particular sarcomas.

Susanne joined the University of Birmingham as senior lecturer in Paediatric Oncology in October 2018. She is based at the Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit within the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences and is involved in the paediatric cancer trial portfolio of the unit with focus on sarcomas (eg the overarching platform trial FaR-RMS for rhabdomyosarcoma patients). She is leading on taking forward novel agents in rhabdomyosarcoma within the trial setting.

With regards to research into DNA repair inhibitors Susanne has developed the arm D in the paediatric ESMART (NCT02813135) stratified medicine basket study; this arm is investigating the combination of the PARP inhibitor Olaparib and irinotecan in paediatric patients with either Ewing’s sarcoma or tumours with genomic alterations in the homologous recombination repair pathway and is currently in Phase II (Phase I presented at ASCO 2019 (poster) and SIOP 2019 (oral)).

Susanne is further actively involved in the paediatric stratified medicine programme and molecular profiling initiatives for paediatric cancers.